


Blue Butterflies

by vaingloriousactor



Series: Victor and Victoria [3]
Category: Corpse Bride (2005)
Genre: F/M, Ghosts, Nightmares, OC children - Freeform, PTSD, Sorry Julia, the afterlife
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-22
Updated: 2019-01-22
Packaged: 2019-10-14 09:16:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,348
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17505821
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vaingloriousactor/pseuds/vaingloriousactor
Summary: Victor is haunted by nightmares of his time in the underworld, but his own death and his newly-formed family bring comfort.





	Blue Butterflies

They were making their first social calls as a married couple. It was strange to be introduced as  _ Mr. and Mrs. Van Dort. _ What was more uncomfortable was reading the faces of the people sitting across from them and seeing that they were obviously thinking about everything that had happened on the night that Victor almost--almost married Emily. Nobody was willing to talk about the completely unbelievable things that happened that night, but their faces showed either curiosity or wariness. The married couple, in return, conversed shyly and awkwardly.

 

Dirty slush was piled on the sides of the roads, but it didn’t matter, as the carriage deposited them right in front of the house of someone who was Victoria’s second cousin once removed, or something.

 

“You both must be freezing,” the wife said. “You need something to fortify you.”

 

She gave them a friendly smile, the warmest smile Victoria had seen all day, and then called to her footman. In only a moment or two, he returned with three wine glasses on a silver tray.

“To your marriage,” the hostess said, raising her glass. “May you have many happy years.”

 

Victor and Victoria clinked their glasses against hers. The hostess almost drained her glass in one gulp. Victoria sipped at hers. She looked over at Victor and saw with a thump in her heart that Victor was frozen, staring at the dark liquid with fear in his eyes. He swallowed, but though his hand wavered, he couldn’t raise the glass to his lips.

 

In a flash, Victoria reached out and gently pulled the wine glass out of his hand. He turned his head to look at her, a deep crease forming between his eyes. Victoria kept her eyes on his as she drank deep. 

 

When she lowered the glass, she gave him a tender look that tried to convey,  _ it’s alright. _ Victor almost smiled. The tension dropped off his shoulders. He took the wine glass from her, his fingers lingering for a second on her hand.   
  


...  
  


The nerves came and went with the days, at times escalating to the point where Victoria oversaw each meal’s preparation for weeks (and from this grew a quiet, fond familiarity that she shared with the Van Dorts’ cook). But nonetheless Victor and Victoria fell increasingly in love, their marriage based on trust and a sequestered serenity.

 

They had moved into their own country home, settling into new routines away from the Van Dorts (and the private knowledge they would be joined by a new addition in a mere seven or eight months), when Lord and Lady Everglot insisted the young couple accompany them to the city in preparation for their annual Christmas party (one they had only been able to host again upon acquiring some of their daughter’s new family’s riches). Camden market was alive, bustling with throngs of holiday revelers rushing to get the last of their own supplies. And it was only within minutes that Victor and Victoria found themselves separated from her parents (no doubt with some sense of relief). They browsed the stalls, Victor eyeing each delicacy suspiciously, then glancing at Victoria with a sideways smile. She would hook her arm through his, looking up at him from beneath the brim of her new winter hat, a velvet ostentatious number picked out for her by her mother-in-law. 

 

Victor turned to smile back, but Victoria was not by his side. Instead, in her place stood the dead bride he had so  desperately hoped to push into his pass. Victor opened his mouth, but no sound came out. Emily. How did Emily get there? She said nothing, herself, instead smiling that wicked wry smile and he stumbled backwards. But when he turned to run, he saw only corpses, skeletons, ghoulish creatures in place of the very much alive Londoners he had been in the midst of before. That’s when the scream came. And he ran to the best of his abilities. He stumbled and stumbled through the crowd of the dead. And finally he got a name out.  _ Victoria _ . He called for her again.

 

Victoria stared in shock as Victor reeled back. He was happy one second and looked horrified the next. He was gone before she could react, lost in the crowd. She wasn’t tall enough to see anything above the shoulders and heads of the hundreds of people pressing in around her. People jostled about, some stumbling back in Victor’s wake with muffled oaths. She tried to move forward into the crowd, but the diminutive young lady was pushed back. Then she heard her name shouted. She had to get to Victor. Blind panic lending her strength, she dodged through the mass of people until she could grab him by the arm. The sudden touch elicited another scream. But she took both his hands in hers.

 

“Victor. Victor,” she said. She squeezed his hands. “It’s only me.”

 

He turned his eyes to her face, heart beating fast. He blinked and shook his head to clear it, deep creases in his forehead. “Victoria?” he asked.

 

“It’s me,” she said. Her voice wavered. 

 

Without another word, he pulled her into a tight embrace. She could feel the frantic beating of his heart in her own chest. 

 

“Stop making a scene at  _ once _ ,” Victoria’s mother snapped. She was suddenly standing in front of them, along with Lord Everglot. “What are you doing?”

 

Victoria pulled out of Victor’s arms, fearfully obedient to her mother, but pressed close to Victor’s side.

 

“Couples do not embrace in public.  _ Gentlemen _ do not scream and run through the market like madmen.” Lady Everglot, by the sneer on her face, clearly did not consider Victor to be a gentleman. “Embarrassment to our lineage, why am I even surprised, the whole family stinks of fish…” she muttered in an aside to her husband.

 

“Victor was not acting like a madman!” Victoria said. “He was merely… startled by something.” She glanced sideways at him worriedly.

 

Her father pinched her by the elbow and pushed her into a more sheltered spot, where the four of them were partly hidden from the crowd. “So startled that he went into hysterics.” Aside to his wife, he muttered loud enough for Victor and Victoria to hear: “Perhaps he gets it from his mother, that blowsy woman. They say that religion is passed down from the mother, don’t they?”

 

Neither Victor nor Victoria dignified that with a vocal response, sharing, instead, a look of concern, offense, and, beneath it all, annoyance.

 

As soon as they bolted their cottage door behind them, they collapsed side by side on the couch, both sighing. The carriage ride home was tense, strained, and quiet until Victoria cleared her throat and looked up at her parents.

 

“Victor and I are expecting our first child together.” She averted her gaze, instead looking at Victor spinning his wedding ring around his finger.

 

“So soon?” Her mother pursed her lips, sitting up taller.

 

“Finally.” Her father said instead, snorting derisively. Victoria sighed. There truly was no winning with either of them.

 

And so, home provided a much desired reprieve and, in private at last, Victoria sidled close to Victor’s side, resting her cheek on his shoulder and he found her hand, squeezing it gently. They were quiet for some time, taking a moment to enjoy the other’s warmth and physical comfort. At length, Victoria spoke.

 

“What happened at the market, Victor? I was so scared for you.” She looked up at him, watching as his expression shifted from serene to contemplative to furrowed with anxiety and she regretted her decision. It took him a moment to reply.

 

“I...I saw Emily. Standing in your place. And when I tried to run away, everyone else was dead. I was so scared I was back in the underworld and I couldn’t find you anywhere.” He squeezed her hand tighter and she pressed herself even closer.

 

“Oh Victor.” She all but whispered. “I’m so sorry. But you’re here with me and we’re safe.”

 

Emily already haunted Victor’s nightmares. Countless nights he woke up in a cold sweat, screaming that wretched woman’s name, not out of desire, but out of fear, mistrust. Victoria hated her, swearing to herself that if she could kill the corpse bride again she would.

  
...  
  


Despite Victor and Victoria’s nervousness, her pregnancy went smoothly. A few months after they had first realized they were going to have a child, Victoria still liked to walk through the placid town where they made their new home, arm in arm with Victor. Her steps were heavier than before, and she leaned against Victor’s shoulder contentedly. At night, she curled up under the duvet with Victor’s arms around the widest part of her stomach.

 

A new shop opened up in town, a shop that was mostly visited by giggly young girls who were shy of actually buying anything. It was a purveyor of the supernatural. Instructions for holding a seance and tarot cards. Materials purported to be for casting curses on one’s enemies and, of course, love potions. It intrigued Victoria. Not that she wanted to mess with the supernatural, per se. She didn’t want to court the dead. Quite the reverse.

 

She gently guided Victor inside, her arm in the crook of his, and smiled hello to the vague-looking woman proprietor of the shop. There was a large variety of crystals and vials and charms labeled for protection. 

 

Victor was nervous, his posture stiff. “What are you looking for?” he asked Victoria, confused by her sudden interest. The other wordly was not usually an interest of hers.

 

“This says it keeps away nightmares, Victor,” she said in a low voice, reading a label.

 

He still looked confused, not following what she was thinking. He didn’t want to go further into the recesses of the shop, away from the window display that drew the young girls inside. Victoria left his side and meandered from one shelf to another. There were baskets of quartz crystals and geodes, and other baskets full of polished bead-like gems of every single color that felt liquidy smooth in Victoria’s hand. Soon she had picked a few different charms off the shelves, some purporting to come from the Near East, from China, from Egypt, or even the Americas. All of them were labeled for keeping away nightmares, evil spirits, curses, wrathful ghosts. Victoria felt almost lighter as she handed over a few pounds for the protective charms and carried them home in a neat bundle. 

 

Victor watched her, his brows knit, as she walked through the house, carefully considering the walls and ceiling. Her pregnant stomach went before her into every room. 

 

“Could you please help me, Victor?” she asked her significantly taller husband. When he hesitated, she tugged him closer to kiss him softly. “I want the house to be protected from...anything. Any of the things that live in the world of the dead, or elsewhere. So you can sleep better at nights. And it’ll make me happy.”

 

She smiled a little bit, encouragingly. He helped her hang charms up above the door and high on the walls. She hung a dreamcatcher above their bed, feathers dangling down toward Victor’s side. 

 

Ignoring the other townspeople and Victor quietly asking her if she had enough already, Victoria added to her collection every time the store had new wares and every time gypsies blew into town to tell fortunes for coins. 

 

...

 

It was strange--ironic, maybe--that death seemed to bring peace. It brought relief from some of Victor’s anxieties. He behaved as though a weight had been lifted off his shoulders. It was easier to be dead than to be alive. The shy, awkward young man had always dreaded embarrassing himself at social events, and now society had no demands on him. He was free to spend all his time with his wife and his daughter in their quiet home. Victoria did not receive many invitations. The presence of a young widow would make card parties awkward, and she refused to take off her mourning clothes, no matter how many times her parents suggested she should remarry.

 

Victoria didn’t cease adding to her occult collection with Victor’s death. Rather, the intents behind each charm and token merely shifted. Their new purpose was to keep him in and safe and everything else out. 

 

Specifically, keep Emily out. Victor still checked and double-checked corners and hallways for the dead woman in the wedding dress, still dreaded every piano key played when no one else was home. She was kind, a good spirit, he tried to remind himself, coaxed himself to remember their duets and the way she danced in the moonlight. A good woman who had been wronged. But it was too hard to forget that she had manipulated him, pried pity out of him to the point there was poison on his lips. She left him haunted and damaged and now that he was as dead as she was, it would be all the easier for her to make her return, manifest out of blue butterflies.

 

The same gypsies who sold protective charms to her would instead pull her aside, whispering into her ear that she was haunted, that ghosts surrounded her. Victoria would simply smile, restraining a quiet, knowing laugh. When they tried to sell her spells and tinctures to open up bridal images for her future, she would stubbornly refuse, remembering what she had told her parents a mere two years prior.  _ It’s a bride I fear _ . Now it was just a bride she hated.

 

“I’ll kill her again if it comes down to it.” Victoria murmured, stabbing a needle through a frozen dead butterfly, pinning it behind a plate of glass and smiling at her handiwork. “See?”

 

Victor smiled in spite of himself and reached for her hand. He bounced Viola in his lap. She looked up at his face without a trace of fear at the blue tinge of his (remaining) skin and the visible bones of his arms, then snuggled against his waistcoat.

 

They were protected.

  
  



End file.
